Spectre (Sam Mendes, 2015) and a Certain Tendency in Hollywood Cinema

Lord this was boring, self-important rubbish. How can a studio spend $250 million working with great actors and superb technicians in some of the most interesting locations in the world and produce 2 hours 40 minutes of meh? I don’t suggest that making a good film is easy – if it was more people would be doing it, but making a dull action film takes some effort.

It all starts promisingly with a neat opening sequence in Mexico, using the Day of the Dead as backdrop to the action. Bond is targeting a mystery man, the assassination goes wrong and a fight in a helicopter ensues. Nothing too original, but the location is good and the opening tracking shot is fun. From there it goes downhill at pace as Craig’s torso gets felt up by octopus tentacles in a credit sequence that seems to be channeling the more outré corners of a loner’s Anime collection. Then, after London preliminaries, a whole vacuous sequence in Rome that does nothing to advance the plot, wastes Monica Bellucci (who appears to dress up in underwear after sex) and features one of the most dull car chases I’ve ever witnessed (and I’ve seen a few). Everything feels done by rote, and Craig looks miserable. Worse the film suffers from an air of self-importance and glumness as if everyone really thinks they’re making a significant work of art. Much as I love action films, rarely do they reach that level, despite their sociological importance as cultural barometers (read some of the late Umberto Eco’s work to get this). The cinematography is very pretty but ill-fitting and it’s edited at a snail’s pace. Mendes seems to have mistaken slow for serious. And good god he uses a lot of slow-dollies into rooms. It’s his Abrams/lens-flare compulsion.

Léa Seydoux is dumped with nothing to do and her romance to Craig seems entirely vacuous – dashing from anger to lust during the course of a fight on a train. Craig himself has failed to build on the promise of the excellent Casino Royale, instead taking the glummer parts of the over-rated Skyfall to heart, and injects no irony or warmth into his portrayal which leaves the audience with a problem. Bond without leavening humour (an invention of the films, not Fleming’s novels) is a misogynist assassin. Craig looks like he knows this, and it looks like he doesn’t like it (not surprising given the good work he does campaigning against violence towards women). Plus the Bond he’s asked to play is now impervious to even drills into the brain, leaving very little drama to work with and no style. The villain (who’s obviously been Blofeld from the day it was named Spectre) wants to control surveillance over the world. Why? I’m not sure. Perhaps he’s the militant wing of the Bilderberg group? He introduces himself to Bond in a special room with a meteor in it. Why? God knows, and it’s another scene that could be removed from the film with little impact on the narrative. Indeed around an hour could be removed and replaced with a few lines of dialogue.

Caught up in the excitement of the London Olympics liking Skyfall seemed to become a patriotic duty for some, but I find the generally positive reaction to Spectre even more inexplicable – if it weren’t for the reason I spent money to rent it, and that Christoph Waltz appeared to give some life to the film, I would have happily taken my 11 year old daughter’s advice and stopped it. The film also proves Hollywood’s unfailing ability to learn the wrong lessons. In copying first the Bourne films and then the Dark Knight Trilogy the Bond producers have only managed to produce something overlong, over-serious and lacking in the surprise and excitement that made the other films so good. As James Gunn has warned here, copying films does no-one any favours.

It’s a shame, there’s perhaps few people as willing to love a Bond film as I am (I do appear in one of the video games for Christ’s sake), but I found nothing to love and little to like in this snail paced film that had me pining for the fun of yore. In fact, and I do mean this, A View to a Kill is a better film. Really. And it’s not very good (Moore is practically using a Zimmer and the heroine is capable of being snuck up upon by a Zepplin), but it’s never this boring. Craig has followed Brosnan’s pattern of starring in an excellent debut, to be followed by increasingly muddled sequels. I never thought I’d dislike a Bond film as much as Die Another Day but they did it. And that film had Madonna and an invisible car.